Kubrick’s Use of Mickey Mouse Song in ‘Full Metal Jacket’ is Genius!

Just watched Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” for the first time as an adult.

“What?” you say. “Aren’t you the biggest Kubrick fan this side of the Mississippi?”

Apparently not. I mean, I own all the Kubrick films and know them all by heart–except “Full Metal Jacket.”

When I was a kid, I remember coming into the living room while my parents were watching it. It felt so heavy–not in intelectual material, but in mood. This time around, however, I saw the beautiful cinematography and dark, fun house mirror wit that I love in all his movies. I shouldn’t be that surprised; I hated “A Clockwork Orange” when I first saw it at 16. Today, it’s probably my favorite movie of all time.

Kubrick’s genius really shines in the final scene:

By choosing to have the troops sing the Mickey Mouse Club theme song as they march silhouetted by flaming destruction, Kubrick ties three themes together:

The journey from boy to man

Typical of most war movies, we see the main character grow from fresh faced recruit to hardened soldier. This song, however, is effing intense. These guys probably sang this song along with the TV as kids. Now they are singing it together as a shared nostalgia that not only binds them, but also serves to show the contrast between childhood and adulthood; innocent naivety and killed-a-man experienced.

Or maybe, it shows that these guys are still boys having to live as men. Hmmmm….

Camaraderie and the solidification of a group

They’re singing about being members of a club, holding banners high, working in harmony and the shared nostalgia/experience mentioned above. The inviting lyrics could also be mistaken for recruiting.

Notion of the American ideal of bringing freedom, even if through force, to the rest of the world

Mickey Mouse is a symbol for America.

The lyrics are upbeat, inviting people around the world to join a club. The soldiers singing this as they march across a conquered land in order to eradicate communism and forcibly bring freedom make those lyrics ironic.

When I was little, my grandfather would play an old Mickey Mouse Club record. I remember marching around, gleefully raising my mom’s old baton up and down while singing the theme song with joy. There isn’t that same vigor in the voices of these soldiers. They have to make themselves joyful. By singing this particular song, they are able to grasp on to any last scrap of humanity or any distant memory of innocence. Brilliant.

I also loved this scene, and last night I found out where Kubrick got the idea. I was reading “The Doom Pussy” a book by journalist Elaine Shepard about the Vietnam War which was published in 1967. On page 167 several Air Force flyers have started their own “Mickey Mouse Club” in a bar in Saigon and they sing, beer in hand and Mickey Mouse ears on their heads, the song. Several verses of the song are spelled out in the text. This in and of itself made me think that Kubrick must have read the book, but then, on page 168, after the song has finished, one of the airmen, Tors, says “I hope the producer of Strangelove never gets a hold of that.” The bar owner responds, “Why, didn’t you know? It’s just possible that Dr. Strangelove lives in Peking.”

Twenty years later Kubrick used the song in his Vietnam epic. A tribute to “Doom Pussy,” or maybe a little inside joke? The world may never know.

Mickey mouse is a direct refrence to Mk-Utra mind control being used by the elites. Also Full Metal Jacket is not really about vietnam (If you look closley it looks nothing like vietnam- its really about Kubrick predicting future wars in the middle east e.g compare the pictures of the urban battalfield to Iraq). Also this movie touches on the phantom bullet theory about JFK conspiracy theory (for more info check it out here: http://www.collativelearning.com/FMJ%20pt%2015.html )

All of a sudden [during the “Mickey Mouse” scene] it dawned on me… The song has several meanings in this context [some are explained above]… But what stood out to me was that the fact that “M-I-C” is spelled out…

MIC = Military Industrial Complex (which Eisenhower warned everybody about & what still holds the world by the throat to this day as a never ending machine IN THE BUSINESS of creating never ending wars (for profit)…

That’s what Kubrick is referring to here (more than anything else)… It’s about as powerful a metaphor as the “GOLD ROOM” in ‘The Shining’… Go look it up if you want to know what I mean…

I think it was a retreat back to innocence, to the only thing that could hold them together as a club. The whole squad had just learned some hard lessons about the war (and about themselves). Remember that the first scene in country ends with a rip-off and the question of why are we in Vietnam. There is further effort to explore that with some of the press interviews. And the song is the final answer, that it does not matter, Survival in that world of shit is the only thing that matters.